Document Type

Dissertation

Rights

Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International Licence

Disciplines

Public and environmental health

Publication Details

  1. This research project, by Bernadette King, in collaboration with the Garda Road Safety Unit as part of the College Awareness of Road Safety (CARS) project , was supervised by Victor Hrymak. Bernadette conducted the research as part of her M.Sc in Environmental Health and Safety.

Abstract

This study assessed the driver behaviour of 1,200 drivers near three schools in South County Dublin. This literature review focuses on articles discussing factors believed to influence drivers speed choice and the perception of drivers towards speed limits and explore how the theory of planned behaviour or reasoned action has been used to improve prediction and explanation of driver behaviour. The primary goal of this study was to assess driver behaviour near three schools and establish if they are complying with the posted speed limit. It also set out to seek to establish what factors if any were associated with driver behaviour and establish if there was a correlation between demographics and compliance with the speed limit. The main finding of this research was that one in five drivers are speeding near schools with almost 20% of the drivers breaking the speed limit by up to 10 km/h. i.e. 60 km/h. This study found that a relationship existed between age of drivers and non compliance with the speed limit. 25.5% of the drivers in the 17-30 age bracket disobeyed the speed limit, 23.3% of the drivers in the 31-50 age category disobeyed the speed limit and 13.10% of the drivers in the 50+ category disobeyed the speed limit. No significant relationship was found between gender of the drivers sampled and non compliance with the speed limit. 23% females were found to be speeding compared to 21.8% of males. Another major finding of this study was that drivers within the locations studied disobeyed the speed limit significantly more on non school term days than on school term days. On school term days drivers appeared to disobey the speed by 15.7% compared to 42.66% disobeying the speed limit on non school term days. There appeared to be a relationship between road surface conditions and non compliance of the speed limit within the locations studied. On dry road surface conditions 25 % of drivers disobeyed the speed limit, on a wet surface 29.50% of drivers disobeyed the speed and on an icy surface 11% of the drivers disobeyed the speed limit.

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